Crosswords to computers: a critical review of popular approaches to cognitive enhancement.

Cognitive enhancement strategies have gained recent popularity and have the potential to benefit clinical and non-clinical populations. As technology advances and the number of cognitively healthy adults seeking methods of improving or preserving cognitive functioning grows, the role of electronic (e.g.

Naturalistic assessment of everyday activities and prompting technologies in mild cognitive impairment.

Older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) often have difficulty performing complex instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), which are critical to independent living. In this study, amnestic multi-domain MCI (N = 29), amnestic single-domain MCI (N = 18), and healthy older participants (N = 47) completed eight scripted IADLs (e.g.

Application of cognitive rehabilitation theory to the development of smart prompting technologies.

Older adults with cognitive impairments often have difficulty performing instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs). Prompting technologies have gained popularity over the last decade and have the potential to assist these individuals with IADLs in order to live independently. Although prompting techniques are routinely used by caregivers and health care providers to aid individuals with cognitive impairment in maintaining their independence with everyday activities, there is no clear consensus or gold standard regarding prompt content, method of instruction, timing of delivery, or interface of prompt delivery in the gerontology or technology literatures.

Reactions to a remote-controlled video-communication robot in seniors' homes: a pilot study of feasibility and acceptance.

Objective: Remote telepresence provided by tele-operated robotics represents a new means for obtaining important health information, improving older adults' social and daily functioning and providing peace of mind to family members and caregivers who live remotely. In this study we tested the feasibility of use and acceptance of a remotely controlled robot with video-communication capability in independently living, cognitively intact older adults.

Materials And Methods: A mobile remotely controlled robot with video-communication ability was placed in the homes of eight seniors.

PUCK: An Automated Prompting System for Smart Environments: Towards achieving automated prompting; Challenges involved.

The growth in popularity of smart environments has been quite steep in the last decade and so has the demand for smart health assistance systems. A smart home-based prompting system can enhance these technologies to deliver in-home interventions to users for timely reminders or brief instructions describing the way a task should be done for successful completion. This technology is in high demand given the desire of people who have physical or cognitive limitations to live independently in their homes.

Recovery of content and temporal order memory for performed activities following moderate to severe traumatic brain injury.

Few studies have investigated the complex nature of everyday activity memory following traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study examined recovery of content and temporal order memory for performed activities during the first year in individuals who suffered moderate to severe TBI. TBI and control participants completed eight different cognitive activities at baseline (i.

Predictions of verbal episodic memory in persons with Alzheimer's disease.

This study examined awareness of memory problems and memory self-monitoring abilities in individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Participants were 20 individuals with AD and 20 older adult controls. A global performance-prediction paradigm, which required participants to predict the number of words they would remember both prior to and after completing a list-learning memory task, was used as the online assessment measure.

Episodic memory predictions in persons with amnestic and nonamnestic mild cognitive impairment.

A performance-prediction paradigm was used to examine metamemory abilities in 27 individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI), 14 individuals with nonamnestic MCI, and 41 controls. To assess memory self-awareness, participants predicted the number of words they would remember before completing a list-learning memory task. Memory self-monitoring was evaluated by participants' ability to increase the accuracy of their predictions after experience with the list-learning task.

Wechsler Memory Scale-III Faces test performance in patients with mild cognitive impairment and mild Alzheimer's disease.

Little is known about the sensitivity of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Third Edition (WMS-III) Faces subtest to memory impairment associated with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In this study, Faces performance was examined in 24 MCI patients, 46 mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, and 98 elderly controls. We hypothesized that participants with diagnoses of MCI or AD would be impaired relative to controls on Faces.